Ardrea Lambeth-Smith, the Ernest C. Myer Elementary School principal who has been on paid leave since allegedly taking a piano from the Hurley school without permission, will be allowed to retire in June 2014, the Kingston Board of Education decided on Wednesday.

A resolution allowing Lambeth-Smith to leave her job "for the purposes of retirement to receive benefits from the New York State Teachers' Retirement System" was approved unanimously by the board.

The board did not discuss the resolution publicly before voting.

Lambeth-Smith has been on paid administrative leave since June 2012, and that will continue through this coming August. She then will be on unpaid leave until her retirement 10 months later.

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"Smith will remain on paid administrative leave through August and then be placed on unpaid administrative leave pending her retirement on June 30, 2014," Kingston school district Superintendent Paul Padalino said in a prepared statement.

Lambeth-Smith's2011 salary was listed as $118,513, according to the Empire Center's SeethroughNY database.

Padalino's statement, which he read during Wednesday night's school board meeting at Robert Graves Elementary School in Port Ewen, said, in part: "The details of the agreement were worked out between counsel for the district and Dr. Smith's attorney over the past few months with the intent to avoid the potential for protracted legal proceedings that could have involved matters in both the courts and before administrative agencies."

Kingston school district officials have not disclosed the findings of their investigation of the piano incident and have not explained why the matter was not referred to law-enforcement authorities.

Calling the incident a personnel matter, Padalino has spoken only generally about the situation since initially confirming the district was investigating an allegation that Lambeth-Smith took home a piano that had been donated to the Myer school in May 2012.

Padalino has said the incident has been handled as an internal personnel matter and that police were not contacted.

The procedure the school district must follow when handling a possible disciplinary matter includes administrative leave that assumes employees are innocent until proven guilty, Padalino has said.

Although district officials have not discussed the details of the allegation against Lambeth-Smith, a now-retired school maintenance worker and the family that donated the piano have provided their accounts of what happened.

The family of Harriet Drake, a former cafeteria worker at Myer, donated the piano to the school after her death.

Drake's son, Tim, has said Lambeth-Smith contacted him about buying the piano from his family. Drake said he told Lambeth-Smith he would talk to his siblings to see how they felt, research the piano's value if his family was inclined to sell it and get back to her. He said he was outraged to learn Lambeth-Smith was alleged to have removed his mother's piano from the school without further discussion.

Charles Reis, who retired from his district job as a skilled mechanic on June 30, 2012, has said he was part of the crew that first retrieved the upright piano from Drake's Hurley home in May after her family donated the instrument to the school. A few weeks later, he said, he was part of the crew that was summoned to take the piano from Lambeth-Smith's office to the principal's Kingston home.

Reis has said he was told Lambeth-Smith had told his supervisor, Tom Clapper, that she had permission to take the piano home to ensure no students got hurt because it was in the way.

Reis has said Gary Tomczyk, the school district's top business official prior to his own retirement at the end of June, later told him Lambeth-Smith was instructed not to remove the piano from the school.